Religion and Slave Revolts in the Roman Mediterranean

During both the republic and the empire, Romans enslaved large numbers of people, drawn from captives taken in warfare and from generations of children born to those they had enslaved. Given the imbalance in source material toward free Roman societal concerns, the lives of the enslaved are but sketchily drafted and rely heavily on descriptions written by their enslavers. Their religious beliefs and praxes are mentioned rarely, and never without bias. Similarly, despite the fame of a few revolts, the motivations and details even of the better-known rebellious leaders are often murky.

In this monograph, Chance E. Bonar demonstrates that we cannot understand slave revolts or Roman discussions of them without understanding the religious cultures of both the enslaved and their enslavers. Religious conviction could provide a catalyst for revolts as well as a means to delegitimize and suppress them. Further, elite Roman writers used religious cultures to craft their own narratives of slave revolts, sometimes decades or even centuries later. Bonar extracts the strands of religious thought among the enslaved that have been hidden by dominant accounts, recovering fuller pictures of their lives.